An increasing number of pastors are turning to artificial intelligence for help in preparing their sermons, and Mike Bullmore is worried about what that is doing to them. Writing for The Gospel Coalition, Bullmore recalls the first email he received from a company selling an AI sermon assistant. He replied at once — assuming, he says, that he was answering a person — and asked them to shut it down. What they were offering, he told them, would cut out the very heart of preaching, and something of the heart of the preachers who used it.
His argument rests on a charge every preacher knows: Paul’s word to Timothy to present himself to God as one approved, “a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). The emphasis, Bullmore notes, falls on work. “Rightly handling God’s Word requires work, Timothy. Don’t neglect to do the work, Timothy.” He sets beside it Ezra, who “had set his heart to study the Law of the LORD, and to do it and to teach his statutes and rules in Israel” (Ezra 7:10) — study first, then practice, then teaching.
The question he wants pastors to ask is not whether a tool can produce a serviceable sermon. It is: how would I otherwise get done what I am asking it to do, and what am I forfeiting by handing that over? In many, perhaps most, cases, what is being replaced is careful, prolonged thought and earnest, prolonged prayer. Those are not inefficiencies in the process. They are the process.
He gives two reasons. The first is that God uses careful study and earnest prayer to mould the preacher. Character and credibility are not downloaded; they are worked into a person through struggle and, at times, suffering. “Too often, way too often, AI eliminates the struggle and suffering, and as a result, the preacher is rendered anemic and insufficiently formed,” he writes. A congregation then hears a sermon from someone who has not been changed by preparing it. The second reason is that the same discipline is how God moulds the sermon. Paul told the Corinthians that the things of God are spiritually discerned, and Bullmore asks how else spiritual things are to be understood than by the Spirit, and how else the Spirit’s work is to be laid hold of than by humble, prolonged communion with him. He borrows Christopher Watkin’s test: “Which tasks are doing irreplaceable work in me while I do them?”
Bullmore does not claim that AI has no legitimate place. He cannot go so far, he says, as to say there is no use to which it can be put safely — perhaps some small piece of research. But he appeals to preachers to use it “ever so sparingly and briefly,” and never at the expense of their heart or the integrity of their calling. The sermon, on this account, is not a product to be optimised but the overflow of a life spent before God and among his people. What a congregation hears on Sunday is meant to come from someone who has done the work — and been worked on by it.
Source: The Gospel Coalition — thegospelcoalition.org
